Niagara (1953)

Some weeks back, I was reading AJ Finn’s psychological thriller The Woman in the Window, in which the protagonist is addicted to old cinema—especially noir and suspense films. I ended up not liking the book much, but at least I got one good thing out of my reading of it: some recommendations. Including recommendations for films that seem as if they were made by Alfred Hitchcock (who, I should explain, is one of my favourite directors), but weren’t.

Of those, one that immediately caught my attention was Niagara, directed by Henry Hathaway. I had heard of this film before—most memorably on IMDB, where I’d seen its poster and read a brief synopsis about a honeymoon couple running into another couple with marital problems. The poster, with a sultry Marilyn Monroe in a hot pink dress, coupled with that description of the film, didn’t conjure up an image of a Hitchcockian film.

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True Grit (1969)

This last Saturday, on a mere whim (brought on by a good newspaper review) I went off to watch True Grit. The 2010 version, starring Hailee Steinfeld in an Oscar-nominated role as Mattie Ross. It was a good film, in true time-honoured Western mould, with tinges of both feminism and noir. And it spurred me on to finally watch the original True Grit, the film that won John Wayne his only Oscar.

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